Archive for December, 2008

I was trying a Windows Live game on Steam yesterday and got the above error. After a lot of googling I discovered that I needed to install Game for Windows Live. There is version 1.2 and 2.0. Once this were installed the game run correctly.

We have compared the performance of Windows* and Linux*-based CIFS* (Samba*) servers for digital media applications and found that the ext3*-based Linux server’s throughput was up to 53% lower than the Windows server’s–although both used identical hardware (Figure 1). An XFS*-based Linux server had roughly the same performance as the Windows server. Our investigation shows that the difference lies in the filesystem allocation and handling of sparse files. In particular, the Windows client makes an assumption that the CIFS fileserver uses NTFS*, a filesystem that assumes files will be data-full (not sparse). This contradicts a fundamental assumption of ext3–that files are sparse–and leads to fragmentation of files and degraded performance on ext3. Further, we’ve seen this behavior manifested for a broad range of media applications including iTunes*.

Silicon Graphics SGI is showing off a concept supercomputer that could pack as many as 10,000 Intel Atom processors into a single rack. The name SGI gave the concept computer was fittingly cute too, calling it the Molecule.

According to ExtremeTech’s report, the Molecule could offer the computing power and memory bandwidth of more than 750 high-end PCs, while consuming less than half the power and occupying no more than 1.4 percent of the physical space.